In this multi-media presentation Ms. Nugent shares insights from several interconnected research projects she conducted in Germany in recent years. She will begin her talk with the oral history interviews she conducted in 2013/14 with non-Jewish German women who had grown up in Nazi Germany, examining what they remembered about the Hitler Youth and the war. She also interviewed women of the daughter generation, born in the 1950s and 60s, asking them what memories their mothers had shared with them. In the summer of 2016 Ms. Nugent interviewed young women of the third generation, but this time she concentrated on immigrant women from Africa, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. Excerpts from those interviews shed light on the young women’s perspectives on how Germany is dealing with its National Socialist past. Finally, Ms. Nugent will share her own impressions of Germany’s welcoming culture vis-à-vis the refugees and asylum seekers that have flocked to the country since 2015. The presentation will conclude with remarks about the anti-refugee, right-wing protest movement PEGIDA that Ms. Nugent also studied in 2016. In her presentation Ms. Nugent weaves the various strands of her research together for a multifaceted perspective on what she calls “the long shadow of National Socialism.”

Ms. Nugent is the director of the Pew Learning Center and Ellison Library at Warren Wilson College. She grew up in Hamburg, West Germany. Ms. Nugent holds degrees in library science and history from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Western Carolina University. Her research interests focus on memory studies, concentrating on the transmission of memory from mothers to daughters, and on public memorial culture in Germany. Her research projects were supported by a fellowship from the Appalachian College Association and by Warren Wilson College.